LOWELL -- Did whacks to his head while he played football for Lowell High School contribute to Jack Kerouac's descent into depression, substance abuse and self-destruction?

One can only guess. But expanding research into head injuries and Kerouac makes these guesses educated ones.

"Football and the Fall of Jack Kerouac," posted recently on The New Yorker's website, provocatively pulls the beat laureate into the growing national worry about long-term brain damage resulting from football head injuries.

Kerouac, who famously scored the only touchdown in the 1938 Lowell-Lawrence game, did not leave his brain to science, only his words to the world.

Chris Nowinski, a co-director of BU's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, says that while there is no way to study Jack Kerouac's brain, his writings offer unique insight into whether the author suffered brain trauma. Nowinski, shown here at a 2011 press conference, is a former Harvard football player whose professional wrestling career was cut short by post-concussion syndrome. AP PHOTO

So the article's author, Ian Scheffler, put together a medical dossier from archival materials and Kerouac's own writings about his head injuries and symptoms, including those that were football-related. Scheffler submitted his findings to leading researchers in the field, including Robert Cantu, a neurosurgeon and co-director of the Boston University School of Medicine's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

Cantu, also a senior advisor to the committee studying head, neck and spine injuries for the National Football League, concluded that Kerouac had all the symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease linked to dementia and depression.

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The disease has been diagnosed posthumously in more than 30 former NFL players, including former linebacker Junior Seau, who killed himself in May 2012.

Kerouac died in 1969 at age 47 of massive abdominal hemorrhaging likely brought on by years of heavy drinking. Without a brain to autopsy, it's speculation whether Kerouac in fact suffered from CTE, and whether that might have led to his famously self-destructive behavior. Cantu told Scheffler his "gut feeling" is some of Kerouac's issues were a result of brain trauma.

If so, how much of a contributing factor was football?

Scheffler's piece opens with Kerouac in April 1958, having had his head beaten against a curb when assaulted outside a Greenwich Village bar. This concussion story is taken from a memoir, "Minor Characters," written by Joyce Johnson, a former girlfriend of the writer.

Also, in 1939, shortly after graduating from Lowell High, Kerouac was in a car accident in Vermont and hospitalized.

Chris Nowinski, a noted advocate for sports-concussion education and prevention, was among those who presented Scheffler's findings. A former Harvard University defensive tackle and professional wrestler who was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome, Nowinski calls Scheffler's article "fascinating."

Kerouac suffered "an extraordinary amount of brain trauma," says Nowinski, another co-director of BU's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. "What is rare is having somebody struggling with their memory and experiencing other symptoms and writing about it."

It is impossible to know which source of head trauma most contributed to Kerouac's symptoms, Nowinski says. "Football is where the impacts were greatest in number," he says. "He was not in a fight every day. But a car accident and fights probably are more significant (incidences) than football. But the brain doesn't know what is hitting it, and (all incidences of brain trauma) contribute."

Paul Marion, executive director of community and cultural affairs at UMass Lowell and a Kerouac scholar, calls Scheffler's article "a fresh take" on a literary icon "sized up as often on the basis of his behavior as for his writing."

"It's an interesting sort of 'time out,' " Marion says. "Given what we're learning (about head injuries) and the latest NFL settlement ($765 million to the more than 4,500 former players involved in a concussion lawsuit). He was a running back, so he was hit. The fact (author Scheffler) took time to go into the archives, with papers now available, means new insights about Kerouac are coming out. Somebody sort of connecting the dots. I had seen letters in which he complained about headaches to his mother."

Kerouac wrote about his first football games on a Dracut sandlot when he was 13. No helmets, no pads.

Back in the days of leather helmets without facemasks, Kerouac warmed the Lowell High bench until his senior year in 1938, when his seven touchdowns ranked second on the team. He was a 5-foot, 6-inch, 165-pound situational halfback, who Coach Tom Keady put into games late in quarters to rip off runs made more memorable by Kerouac's subsequent fictionalized accounts.

The kid could run. Kerouac placed third in the 45-yard hurdles at the 1939 State Indoor Track Meet at the Boston Garden. He was pursued by Boston College's Frank Leahy but chose Columbia, coached by Lou Little. Kerouac played one season at Horace Mann Prep in New York, then the following season suffered a broken leg in his second game with the Columbia freshman team. He quit football early in his sophomore year.

Marion says this possibility Kerouac's behavior could be linked to brain trauma "is something that has to be factored into trying to understand the complex personality that was Jack Kerouac." The New Yorker article "provides a little more context," Marion says.

"It's a weird scenario where brain trauma might make you more interesting, more unpredictable, and sometimes self-destructive," Nowinski says.

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